Coalese Corporation - Raven Primary Care Collaboration

Raven Primary Care Collaboration

The challenge of Improved Primary Care Team Communications and Collaboration

Primary care challenges include the increasing service demands of an ageing population, with an increased prevalence of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, resulting in rapid escalation of acute care costs. These challenges are exacerbated by shortages of healthcare personnel.

Typical physician and clinic EMR (Electronic Medical Records) systems make it difficult for non-physican medical professionals and primary care team members to retrieve the information they need about their patients when they most need it.

The benefits of a team-based approach to primary care, with improved collaboration, communication, and patient information sharing are recognized widely in the western world, and can deliver dramatically improved quality of patient care, decreased wait times, improved information accuracy/reliability, reduced acute care costs, improved service delivery and enhanced productivity.

However, the path towards a team-based primary care approach with improved collaboration, communication and patient medical record access poses some key challenges:

How can we roll out collaboration solutions at the grass roots level, to solve immediate needs and pain points (eg. information sharing between primary care team members such as clinicians, nurses, homecare, EMT/Paramedics, social workers and others), but have that solution evolve gracefully into a fully integrated collaboration/communications framework at the community, regional, provincial and eventually, country level while preserving existing systems investments?
Information Technology (IT) skills and resources are typically very limited or non-existent at the grass-roots level especially in rural locations. How can we address these grass-roots requirements with little to no IT skills/resource requirements and at low cost?
How can we deliver patient record access and collaboration/communication tools that can scale from small individual clinics through to multi-clinic hosted/ASP model EMR implementations?
How can we leverage the wealth of information stored in existing EMR systems and information technology investments to improve primary care collaboration and communications?
How can a primary care team share patient information in such a way that team members only get access to the portions of the patient medical record which are appropriate to the role the healthcare worker plays, while addressing physician concerns about privacy and security?
How can we foster better primary care collaboration through the use of better information sharing tools without requiring large investments in training and education?
How can we involve the patient more actively to better manage their own care through timely access to their own medical information?
How can we minimize the conversion effort and address regulatory requirements for access to archived historical medical information for physicians and clinics that are converting to a new EMR systems?

Coalese Raven Introduction

The Coalese Raven Collaboration and Access Tool is a comprehensive collaboration and patient record access tool, which makes clinic and physician EMR (Electronic Medical Records) information accessible to primary care team members, including homecare, paramedic/EMT, pharmacist, emergency physician and other authorized healthcare workers, using any browser-enabled mobile or remote device.

Raven addresses challenges mentioned earlier by leveraging existing investments in EMR systems and the large body of patient medical records and information that is stored in such systems. The use of the Coalese Raven product facilitates primary care team collaboration/communication and delivers improved patient outcomes.

Raven Primary Care Collaboration Solution Overview

Raven Overview

Raven Primary Care Collaboration Tool key features:

Intuitive User Interface
Mobile and Patient Device Support
No training/education required
No impact on EMR performance
Improved Patient Outcomes
Better Chronic Disease Management
Additional Clinic Revenue Generation

The Coalese Raven Collaboration and Access Tool requires minimal or no IT support requirements, is a low cost solution and provides rapid implementation timeframes and return on investment, typically measured in weeks or months, rather than years.

Coalese's corporate philosophy regarding healthcare solutions and the basis for the Raven Primary Care Collaboration tool can be summed up by the quotation:

"A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle."

- Kahlil Gibran

In a recent study conducted in rural Alberta and published Fall 2007 in the Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine [1], documented the benefits of improved primary care team collaboration, with respect to the care of chronic disease patients, a demographic segment that represents a large component of overall acute care costs and is one that is growing rapidly in the western world:

51% decrease in # of hospital days
32% reduction in emergency visits
25% reduction in hospital admissions
40% decrease in acute service costs
Improved patient outcomes
Improved patient and caregiver satisfaction

Admittedly, not all of these benefits can be attributed to the sharing of EMR patient records between nurses, physicians and the wider primary chronic care team, but as the report documents, increased sharing of such data and better primary care team collaboration was a key factor in the delivery of such benefits. Coalese's Raven tool promotes wider sharing of EMR patient records on any browser-enabled device, with an intuitive user interface and no training required, which are key requirements to make such collaboration feasible amongst busy healthcare practitioners, and thus can help drive substantially reduced acute care costs.

[1] “Nurse-Physician Collaborative Partnership: A rural model for the chronically ill”,
Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine, Fall 2007 Issue.